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Email validation has become a necessity for organizations that aim to protect themselves against cybersecurity threats. The process becomes all the more relevant as 65% of attackers use phishing as a primary infection vector. That’s not a surprise, since attackers have long been weaponizing emails to serve as entry points for cyberattacks.

The ease with which threat actors can create disposable email addresses also contributes to the threat. In less than a minute, they can create a temporary email address with tons of providers, which they then use to send malware-laden and phishing messages to target victims. For this reason, a disposable email domain database can make email security vendors and email validation programs in general more robust and comprehensive. Let us elaborate on that.

Research data indicates that the global email user base steadily increases by 2–3% every year, with the number set to reach 4.7 billion by 2026. Still, marketers are worried that their messages may not reach the right people, resulting in high bounce and low open rates, adversely affecting their marketing efforts. That makes answering email marketing questions more crucial than ever. Is this email valid? Are all the email addresses in my recipient lists valid? Will my messages reach their intended recipients? To know how to check if an email is valid, read on.

The software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry has seen quite an expansion over the last years, with experts predicting that it will account for as much as 75% of all cloud workloads by 2021. The top reason for that is cost-effectiveness since cloud-based SaaS applications generally require less upfront investment and maintenance than on-premise software.

Email remains the most preferred platform for business communication. In marketing, the most efficient way to reach a company’s target audience regardless of their age is through email. The current email open rate stands at 22.86% compared to social media’s engagement reach of 3.71% only.

Therefore, it is not surprising that a lot of today’s cybersecurity threats still arrive on networks via emails. In fact, 90% of threats use email as an attack vector. Malware-carrying messages that use effective social engineering ploys still manage to trick unsuspecting users into downloading malicious attachments or clicking embedded harmful links.

In this series of blogs, we investigate the background of individual spam mail cases. By using tools provided by WhoisXML API: the domain reputation, WHOIS, and e-mail verification APIs, we unfold the background of these messages. This approach also reveals interesting details about the behavior and habits of spammers and cybercriminals using e-mail, typically for phishing.

In spite of all the effort e-mail providers put in worldwide, every user receives a tremendous amount of unwanted and malicious mail to any e-mail account. It is indeed annoying, but let’s look on the bright side: we can use these examples to demonstrate how useful the APIs by WhoisXML API can be in the battle against unwanted spam e-mails. In today’s example we’ll be using the e-mail verification API, the domain reputation API and the WHOIS API to analyze a spam email message which was not caught by a well-configured open-source spam filtering system.

In the mid-90’s, when Tim Berners-Lee created the foundational elements of what would later become the World Wide Web, business and society entered the digital age. One of the many innovations that accompanied this technological transformation was email, which rapidly grew into the primary business communication medium.

Since then, the infiltration of social media and instant messaging apps have been chipping away at the dominance of email, but it still remains a critical component of modern IT architectures. However, due to its ubiquity, email is a common threat vector utilized by cybercriminals for nefarious purposes.